Cooperation

Cooperation is behavior designed to benefit the group rather than the individual. This ultimately benefits the individual, which is the purpose of cooperation.

Why this is important

This is big. Unless we can quickly reach a critical mass of global cooperation there's no way to solve the environmental sustainability problem. Understanding cooperation thus lies at the heart of solving the problem.

Application example

Because cooperation is so critical to understand there's been a mountain of research on the subject. The central question is: How can cooperation in a given social system be increased to the critical amount needed to solve certain problems?

Every once in awhile someone takes a huge innovative whack at a problem everyone else has been tinkering with and makes a leap of discovery.

The work of Robert Axelrod, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, is one such leap. His breakthrough research was published in 1984 in the seminal work of cooperation theory, The Evolution of Cooperation.

Theorizing that cooperation theory could be more correctly studied by pitting rule driven computer agents against each other, Axelrod staged a tournament. Anyone could enter. The entry consisted of a set of rules an agent would follow when facing each other in multiple Prisoner's Dilemma encounters. The agents were all the same except for their rules. Each agent was paired with every other agent one at a time.

The results were astonishing. It was the simplest rule set, called Tit-For-Tat, that won. It's rules were:

1. When you first encounter an opponent you cooperate. Tit-For-Tat always cooperates on the first move. It's a nice guy.

2. Thereafter, if on the previous move the opponent cooperated, then so do you. If he defected, then so do you. On all but the first move, Tit-For-Tat does exactly what his opponent did on the previous move.

Of the 14 entries, most were greedy. All except RANDOM were more complex. But that didn't work. It was the simplest and the "nicest" strategy that won.

Why was this?

It might have been because game theory was too immature, so Axelrod held a second tournament. 62 entries were submitted this time, including Tit-For-Tat with no changes to its original rules. The results were stunning. Tit-For-Tat won again.

Why was this?

Axelrod theorizes there are fundamental rules that form the foundation for all social groups. The basic rules are simple. If you will encounter another social agent again and you can gain more from cooperation than competition (defection) when you meet this time, then it pays to cooperate. This forms the basic Theory of Cooperation. For a peek at the rest of the theory: 1

Much more can be said about the conditions necessary for cooperation to emerge, based on thousands of games in the two tournaments, theoretical proofs, and corroboration from many real-world examples. For instance, the individuals involved do not have to be rational: The evolutionary process allows successful strategies to thrive, even if the players do not know why or how. Nor do they have to exchange messages or commitments: They do not need words, because their deeds speak for them. Likewise, there is no need to assume trust between the players: The use of reciprocity can be enough to make defection unproductive. Altruism is not needed: Successful strategies can elicit cooperation even from an egoist. Finally, no central authority is needed: Cooperation based on reciprocity can be self-policing.

These are exciting discoveries because we'd like the solution to the sustainability problem to be "self-policing", with "no need to assume trust between the players", and with "no central authority" since the United Nations is not a central authority (it uses consensus decision making with a small group having veto power), and no "commitments" since international treaties are so difficult to achieve.

Here's what applies more than anything else to the sustainability problem:

For cooperation to emerge, the interaction must extend over an indefinite (or at least an unknown) number of moves, based on the following logic: Two egoists playing the game once will both be tempted to choose defection since that action does better no matter what action the other player takes. If the game is played a known, finite number of times, the players likewise have no incentive to cooperate on the last move, nor on the next-to-last move since both can anticipate a defection by the other player. Similar reasoning implies that the game will unravel all the way back to mutual defection on the first move. It need not unravel, however, if the players interact an indefinite number of times. And in most settings, the players cannot be sure when the last interaction between them will take place. An indefinite number of interactions, therefore, is a condition under which cooperation can emerge.

The hallmark of the sustainability problem is delays in time and space for damage to the environment. If the negative effects of pollution and natural resource depletion were immediate, people would immediately stop such misbehavior. But they don't because the better payoff is to destroy the environment now and suffer the consequences later. This has made it extraordinarily difficult to get the widespread agreement necessary to solve the problem.

Axelrod's work on cooperation theory opens a chink in this seemingly insolvable problem. His research, along with that of many others, shows quite clearly that if "the interaction must extend over an indefinite number of moves" then the better payoff is cooperation. So why isn't that happening in the real world?

Research shows it's because there are more conditions for cooperation than we've stated. These are too complex to explore here. The nub of the matter is that even though social agents like people, governments, and corporations live on the same planet, their interaction does not extend over an indefinite number of moves. Instead, it extends over a short number of moves. The further a move occurs in the future, the less it matters.

This is the phenomenon of short term versus long term payoffs. It's why short term profit matters far more than long term profit. That phenomenon is more than just a phenomena of interest. It's a fundamental law of behavior, one that could be called the Law of Short Term Payoff Preference. The law states that the agent choosing the shorter term payoff will win out in the survival of the fittest game over an opponent who chooses a greater payoff over a longer term. The exact numerical value used in calculations is about a 10% discount rate. That is, the future is discounted 10% every year, so the future is worth less the further forward in time you go. For example, one dollar today is worth 6 cents in 30 years at a 10% discount rate. In 50 years it's worth 1 cent.

It follows that:

Since that law cannot be broken,
the sustainability problem is insolvable.

So conventional wisdom goes. But conventional attacks on the sustainability problem have fallen into the same ruts and narrow mindedness that cooperation researchers before Axelrod did. They could not see there were other possibilities.

The Law of Short Term Payoff Preference can be broken. Not for all players, but for the one that matters most. When you put the right pieces of the puzzle together, it's really quite simple:

1. In the sustainability problem, the eight thousand pound gorilla is the New Dominant Life Form, also known as the modern large for-profit corporation.

2. The corporate life form is an artificial life form.

3. All artificial life forms were created by Homo sapiens.

4. All artificial life forms follow their goals.

5. These goals were defined and created by their master, Homo sapiens.

6. Therefore these goals can be changed.

7. The goals can be changed from short term profit maximization to long term optimization of quality of life for Homo sapiens.

8. After this the Law of Short Term Payoff Preference no longer applies to the dominant life form in the human system.

9. It's been replaced by the Law of Long Term Preference, which solves the problem because the goals of a social system's dominant agents determine the dominant behavior of the system.

Changing that goal will not be easy, due to monstrously large change resistance. The eight thousand pound gorilla will put up the fight of its life.

But if we can find the various root causes involved, we can win that fight.

The opposite of cooperation is competition. A small amount of competition between social agents makes for a healthy social system. It keeps it from degrading and becoming inefficient.

But too much competition destroys a social system every time, whether the system is a couple, a family, an organization, a team, a community, a nation, or a planet.

Altruism

Why do people perform altruistic deeds, like giving money to charity or helping a stranger, when that will not help themselves?

Altruism is behavior that promotes chances of survival of others at a cost to one's own. There seems to be no logical reason for altruistic behavior. It appears to be suicidal. So why is the so much altruism, not just in people but in bee and ant colonies?

This was one of the great puzzles of evolutionary theory because it seemed to fly against the survival of the fittest rule. If a member of a species performs behavior that reduces his chances of survival, then his likelihood of reproduction is reduced and his genes will die out. But that's not what was happening in so many cases. The phenomenon of altruism seems to discredit the theory of evolution.

Charles Darwin sensed the reason for altruism was that is benefited a group sharing the same genes. In this passage from The Origin of Species, he wrote:

“This difficulty, though appearing insuperable, is lessened, or, as I believe, disappears, when it is remembered that selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual, and may thus gain the desired end. Breeders of cattle wish the flesh and fat to be well marbled together. An animal thus characterized has been slaughtered, but the breeder has gone with confidence to the same stock and has succeeded.”

But what was the exact reason altruism was beneficial? Why did it appear in one place and not another?

The answer did not appear until 1964, when William Hamilton published what came to be known as Hamilton's Rule. It stated that if genetic Relatedness times Benefits to the recipient was greater than the Cost of the behavior, then the behavior would be preferred, because it would maximize the chances of ones own genes entering the next generation. This is expressed as:

Relatedness x Benefits > Cost

which is the formal form of Hamilton's Rule.

At first glance it appears possible to apply Hamilton's Rule and related concepts to the sustainability problem, since solving it requires huge amounts of altruistic behavior. However, this line of research is a trap. It commits the Fundamental Attribution Error because it assumes that individual behavior is the source of the problem. It's not. The source is much deeper, at the root cause level.

Are you as concerned as we are about the rise of populust authoritarians like Donald Trump? Have you noticed that democracy is unable to solve important problems like climate change, war, and poverty? If so this film series is for you!

Why is democracy in crisis? One intermediate cause is a weakened Voter Feedback Loop. Powerful root cause forces are working to weaken the loop.

The most eye-opening article on the site since it was written in December 2005. More people have contacted us about this easy to read paper and the related Dueling Loops videos than anything else on the site.

Do you every wonder why the sustainability problem is so impossibly hard to solve? It's because of the phenomenon of change resistance. The system itself, and not just individual social agents, is strongly resisting change. Why this is so, its root causes, and several potential solutions are presented.

The analysis was performed over a seven year period from 2003 to 2010. The results are summarized in the Summary of Analysis Results, the top of which is shown below:

Click on the table for the full table and a high level discussion of analysis results.

The Universal Causal Chain

This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: the black arrows. This leads to using superficial solutions to push on low leverage points to resolve intermediate causes.

Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, where the complete causal chain runs to root causes. It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like renewable energy and strong regulations should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes.

In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden red arrow. Further analysis finds the blue arrow.Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create the green arrow which solves the problem. For more see Causal Chain in the glossary.

This is no different from what the ancient Romans did. It’s a strategy of divide and conquer. Subproblems like these are several orders of magnitude easier to solve because you are no longer trying (in vain) to solve them simultaneously without realizing it. This strategy has changed millions of other problems from insolvable to solvable, so it should work here too.

For example, multiplying 222 times 222 in your head is for most of us impossible. But doing it on paper, decomposing the problem into nine cases of 2 times 2 and then adding up the results, changes the problem from insolvable to solvable.

Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.

Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other subproblems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, effort to solve the other three subproblems is largely wasted effort.

The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.

Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.

In the sustainability problem, large for-profit corporations are not cooperating smoothly with people. Instead, too many corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their strenuous opposition to solving the environmental sustainability problem.

The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. The goal of the corporate life form is maximization of profits, while the goal of the human life form is optimization of quality of life, for those living and their descendents. These two goals cannot be both achieved in the same system. One side will win and the other side will lose. Guess which side is losing?

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause follows easily. If the root cause is corporations have the wrong goal, then the high leverage point is to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

The world’s solution model for solving important problems like sustainability, recurring wars, recurring recessions, excessive economic inequality, and institutional poverty has drifted so far it’s unable to solve the problem.

The root cause appears to be low quality of governmental political decisions. Various steps in the decision making process are not working properly, resulting in inability to proactively solve many difficult problems.

This indicates low decision making process maturity. The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise the maturity of the political decision making process.

In the environmental proper coupling subproblem the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. Environmental impact from economic system growth has exceeded the capacity of the environment to recycle that impact.

This subproblem is what the world sees as the problem to solve. The analysis shows that to be a false assumption, however. The change resistance subproblem must be solved first.

The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property (like the air we breath). This means that presently there is no way to manage common property efficiently enough to do it sustainably.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to allow new types of social agents (such as new types of corporations) to appear, in order to radically lower transaction costs.

Solutions

There must be a reason popular solutions are not working.

Given the principle that all problems arise from their root causes, the reason popular solutions are not working (after over 40 years of millions of people trying) is popular solutions do not resolve root causes.

This is Thwink.org’s most fundamental insight.

Summary of Solution Elements

Using the results of the analysis as input, 12 solutions elements were developed. Each resolves a specific root cause and thus solves one of the four subproblems, as shown below:

Click on the table for a high level discussion of the solution elements and to learn how you can hit the bullseye.

The 4 Subproblems

The solutions you are about to see differ radically from popular solutions, because each resolves a specific root cause for a single subproblem. The right subproblems were found earlier in the analysis step, which decomposed the one big Gordian Knot of a problem into The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.

Everything changes with a root cause resolution approach. You are no longer firing away at a target you can’t see. Once the analysis builds a model of the problem and finds the root causes and their high leverage points, solutions are developed to push on the leverage points.

Because each solution is aimed at resolving a specific known root cause, you can't miss. You hit the bullseye every time. It's like shooting at a target ten feet away. The bullseye is the root cause. That's why Root Cause Analysis is so fantastically powerful.

The high leverage point for overcoming change resistance is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We have to somehow make people truth literate so they can’t be fooled so easily by deceptive politicians.

This will not be easy. Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first, so it takes nine solution elements to solve this subproblem. The first is the key to it all.

B. How to Achieve Life Form Proper Coupling

In this subproblem the analysis found that two social life forms, large for-profit corporations and people, have conflicting goals. The high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. Since the one causing the problem right now is Corporatis profitis, this means we have to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

Corporations were never designed in a comprehensive manner to serve the people. They evolved. What we have today can be called Corporation 1.0. It serves itself. What we need instead is Corporation 2.0. This life form is designed to serve people rather than itself. Its new role will be that of a trusted servant whose goal is providing the goods and services needed to optimize quality of life for people in a sustainable manner.

What’s drifted too far is the decision making model that governments use to decide what to do. It’s incapable of solving the sustainability problem.

The high leverage point is to greatly improve the maturity of the political decision making process. Like Corporation 1.0, the process was never designed. It evolved. It’s thus not quite what we want.

The solution works like this: Imagine what it would be like if politicians were rated on the quality of their decisions. They would start competing to see who could improve quality of life and the common good the most. That would lead to the most pleasant Race to the Top the world has ever seen.

Presently the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. The high leverage point is allow new types of social agents to appear to radically reduce the cost of managing the sustainability problem.

This can be done with non-profit stewardship corporations. Each steward would have the goal of sustainably managing some portion of the sustainability problem. Like the way corporations charge prices for their goods and services, stewards would charge fees for ecosystem service use. The income goes to solving the problem.

Corporations gave us the Industrial Revolution. That revolution is incomplete until stewards give us the Sustainability Revolution.

This analyzes the world’s standard political system and explains why it’s operating for the benefit of special interests instead of the common good. Several sample solutions are presented to help get you thwinking.

Note how generic most of the tools/concepts are. They apply to far more than the sustainability problem. Thus the glossary is really The Problem Solver's Guide to Difficult Social System Problems, using the sustainability problem as a running example.